How to clear SIM cards

Backing up SIM cards and making copies of your contacts and SMS is the first thing you'd want to do if a SIM reader got into your hands.

However, there may be cases in which destroying data is more important than keeping them. In such cases it becomes a good idea to clear SIM card memory in order to prevent private information from getting into wrong hands. Here are a few examples:

A distant friend visits you, you give them an old phone of yours and a spare SIM - such that they could keep in touch. You don't want them to look through your SMS or SIM contacts.

The phone that you use is given to you by your employer, as you change jobs - you have to return the phone, but you don't want them to access your personal information (ex: the phone numbers of your family and friends, kept in the SIM phonebook, or the SMS you've been exchanging with your significant other).

In these circumstances, you should erase SIM card data before giving the card to anyone. This includes wiping SIM contacts, the SMS archive, the list of last dialled numbers, own numbers stored on the SIM card.

To clear SIM card memory, you have to manually go through each entry and delete it. This is a long and boring operation; besides that - there is a risk that you will accidentally miss some of the entries - simply because there are hundreds of records, and a monotonous operation that involves pressing buttons on a tiny key-pad of a mobile phone is error prone.

There is another risk - some phones do not delete the SMS, making deleted SMS recoverypossible. So, when clearing a SIM card, the objectives are:

erase all SIM card data (not just SMS or phone-book);

wipe SMS, to make it impossible to restore deleted SMS;

automate the process, to remove the possibility of human error.

The solution to this problem is SIM Manager's Clear SIM card feature, it does all of the above in a few clicks.

Besides that, with SIM Manager you can backup SIM cards before erasing them, thus you get to keep a copy of all the sensitive information from the SIM's memory.

Take a look at this video tutorial, which describes how to clear SIM card data without leaving a trace.